


Missing Reference

by gooberAscendant



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Hospitals, Humanstuck, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 22:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1758351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooberAscendant/pseuds/gooberAscendant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill for the prompt: & (Reference operator) (C++): Literally means "address of." & denotes the location of an "object" in memory.</p><p>(HSWC Bonus Round 2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Reference

“Okay, now hit that little play button up there.” You point at the screen over his shoulder.

“Like thith?” His lisp is as adorable as ever. A black window appears on the screen, with the words Hello world! in white text.

“Yep!” You pat him on the shoulder. You haven’t touched him in a long time. It feels normal. You miss normal. You miss him. “Does it ring a bell?”

“Not really.” He sighs. “I like it though. It theemth natural.”

“Let’s keep going then.” You force a grin when he turns to look at you. “You’ll be a master again in no time!”

“With you teaching, of courth.” He turns to you and smiles. You want to kiss him, but don’t.

******

“Why the fuck doeth thith thtill not work?!” He throws his hands up in exasperation.

“Here, let’s just go over it line-by-line.” You lean in closer to the screen and slide the keyboard closer. It’s much easier to reach the computer here in his room, where the desk allows for two chairs to sit side-by-side. In the hospital room, you had to sit behind him in the bed in order to see anything on his laptop screen. The excuse to sit in bed with him was nice though.

“Do you thee anything wrong?” He’s holding his head in his hands now. He always used to do that when he was stuck on a problem. The problems used to be much more complicated, but still, it’s good to see some things never change.

“I think so.” You point to line 93. “You’re assigning this pointer to a variable, instead of the location of that variable. You need to add an ampersand to it.”

“Oh my fuck, I hate pointerth. Why ith that even wrong again?”

“The pointer is just an address, not the info itself. You need to use that to change the same piece of memory in your other function, instead of a just changing a copy of it. But right now, it’s using the info itself as the address, which just gets you a random piece of memory somewhere.” If only it were as easy to fix his real memory problems.

“Right, I knew that. Why do I thuck tho much?!”

You wrap your arms around him instinctively. “It’s fine. No one likes pointers.”

******

You pull away from the kiss. “Does that ring a bell?”

He shakes his head, but smiles. “I like it though. It theemth natural.”

******

You sit beside him, watching him type furiously. It’s becoming difficult to follow his lines of thinking. He always had a coding style very different than your own, and it was beginning to show again.

You don’t have to force a smile anymore.


End file.
